Quietly unsettling: Pat Brassington returns to her roots at Dark Mofo in Hobart

You get the feeling Pat Brassington would prefer getting her teeth pulled to talking about her artwork.

Born and bred in Hobart, a 30-year retrospective of Brassington’s work, A Rebours, made it to her home town at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in May, and last week formed part of the Museum of Old and New Art’s Dark Mofo festival.

Pat Brassington with a piece called By the Way at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.Credit:Peter Mathew

“It’s fantastic when you’re an artist and your work comes home to roost,” says Brassington, a small, slight figure who rarely gives interviews. “In another way, I’d prefer to be anonymous.

“I’ve been shown in Hobart but in smaller venues and in places that are not so much frequented by the general public. So it’s, ah, a mixed thing.”

A Rebours (loosely translated as “against the grain”) premiered at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 2012, and has since been to Sydney and New Zealand.

For Brassington’s Dark Mofo launch she was joined by ACCA curator Juliana Engberg for a guided tour last Friday night, and again appeared with Engberg in conversation at the gallery on Saturday morning, appearing visibly uncomfortable on both occasions.

While Brassington’s main medium is photography, her work also draws on her studies in printmaking. Her images are unsettling, with a quality that Engberg dubs “things that make you go hmmm".

In one piece, a figure shown from the waist down wears a pink slip with a precariously high hemline. On closer inspection, the legs are hairy and there’s a suspicious bulge in the crotch area.

In another, a figure wearing a dress has a dangling lightbulb in place of a head, and in another a naked man is bent over on the floor, his body positioned in such a way that it resembles a phallus.

They are strange and often dark representations, but Brassington bristles at the mention of the word “disturbing”.

“That's a label, I've been tagged with it, I think I'm becoming a little sick of it,” she says. “To the point where I've got someone [a journalist] now so terrified that they're never going to write it again.”

Another label that’s often been applied to her work is “Tasmanian gothic". Brassington is slightly more accepting of this one.

“I really, when I first heard that label I was quite antagonistic because I thought it was derogatory, the weirdness of Tasmania, but once again ... I think it’s quite a unique place in many ways.”

Brassington is from “convict stock” and she concedes that growing up with the “weird stories” embedded in Tasmania’s culture might have had an effect on her art.

“It’s something in my psyche, I guess.”

Psychoanalysis, feminism and surrealism also inform her work – the product of avid reading as a mature-age student. Brassington didn’t come to art until her early 30s.

“I’m so pleased that I didn't go to art school after completing high school. I would have been way undercooked.”

She harboured a desire to be a painter initially, but was seduced by the “lure of the darkroom”. In the late 1980s the advent of digital photography opened her work up to new opportunities.

“The analogue photography was quite restrictive,” she says. "For me – it’s not for other people.

“I was always wanting to do more than what was on my mind ... there were so many tricks you could come up with, so going digital was very liberating.”

Engberg rightly points out, though, that Brassington’s work is not overmanipulated – there’s just a splash of colour here or a displacement there, and her tweaks have the effect of heightening curiosity rather than smoothing the edges.

“I like imperfections ... I take advantage of mistakes sometimes, I don't like to rigidly control things,” says Brassington.

What other people might find disturbing, Brassington usually finds agreeable.

“That's awful, but I like it, that's been one of my yardsticks,” she says.

When asked if she’s proud of her homecoming show, Brassington is characteristically reticent.

“I guess I should be, shouldn’t I?”

In Hobart, she at least feels she has a better idea of how the crowd might react to her work.

“I had a big show that went to Poland,” she says. “That was a different experience, it was quite a big show, and I couldn’t gauge how the audience were relating to the work at all.”

Introducing Brassington in their conversation at the gallery, Engberg referred to her as “one of Australia’s greatest living artists who just happens to live in Tasmania”.

Dark Mofo was a good fit for Brassington, said Engberg, given the dark thread that runs through her art.

“You can pin it to the wall but you can't pin it down, I think that's a great compliment to the work.”

A Rebours is at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, until September 14.